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7 April 2009

Special Lecture by David Firth on Quasivariances

We are pleased to announce a special presentation that should be of interest. David Firth, Professor of Statistics at the University of Warwick, will present on Quasi Variances this *Thursday* from 12-2 pm in room K-354 in CGIS-Knafel (1737 Cambridge St, the usual meeting place for the applied statistics workshop). Professor Firth provided the following abstract for his presentation:

The notion of quasi variances, as a device for both simplifying and enhancing the presentation of additive categorical-predictor effects in statistical models, was developed in Firth and de Menezes (Biometrika, 2004, 65-80). The approach generalizes the earlier idea of "floating absolute risk" (Easton et al., Statistics in Medicine, 1991), which has become rather controversial in epidemiology. In this talk I will outline and exemplify the method, and discuss its extension to some other contexts such as parameters that may be arbitrarily scaled and/or rotated.

A bit of background on Professor Firth. He is Professor of Statistics at the University of Warwick. He specializes in statistical theory and methods, and has a particular interest in generalized linear models---especially as applied to the social sciences. He has published extensively in the discipline's major journals of record, such as JRSS and Biometrika, and has written several packages for the R language and environment. He has made several significant contributions to the field, and is well known as the inventor of bias-reduced logistic regression (also known as 'Firthit').

He is at IQSS as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow (April 7--17), and will be spending part of his time here working with Arthur Spirling on models of momentum for contest data.

We hope everyone will be able to attend

Posted by Justin Grimmer at April 7, 2009 5:52 PM